Caught Short

Anyone who wants to trim Government spending is apt to be branded as a narrow-minded pinchpenny who would starve the poor, paralyze the processes of government and hold back progress. None of these charges would quite fit Mississippi's Representative Jamie L. Whitten, or answer what he had discovered about the living habits of the U.S. Insect-Control Agency, the Agriculture Department's Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine. His House appropriations subcommittee had dispatched three congressional investigators to discover how the bureau had spent its last $7,000,000 budget. Sample findings:

P: At Macon, Ga. the White-Fringed Beetle Control Division was paying for upkeep on an airplane which had flown only 30 hours in two years and only two hours in 1949, for testing.

P: The bureau's Denver office had 217 automobiles, failed to use 194 of them in the first four months of 1949; failed to use 80 of them in the first six months.

P: Denver had also let 23 old trucks rust and disintegrate on the roof of an ample garage, had refused to sell them because the money would revert to the general U.S. treasury fund and thus be lost to the bureau. Meanwhile it had purchased 55 new trucks of similar type without trading in the old trucks.

Whitten wanted bugs controlled as much as anyone else, he insisted in a report made public last week, but he wanted the bug-controllers controlled too. "I think," he admonished Assistant Bureau Chief S. A. Rohwer, "that [the bureau] has been caught short." Replied Rohwer: "I agree with you."

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